herein the politician forms but a
fragment of the leadership, where the business man and the landowner,
the engineer and the man of technical knowledge, the men of a hundred
different pursuits, represent the average type of leadership. No
people has ever permanently amounted to anything if its only public
leaders were clerks, politicians, and lawyers. The base, the
foundation, of healthy life in any country, in any society, is
necessarily composed of the men who do the actual productive work of
the country, whether in tilling the soil, in the handicrafts, or in
business; and it matters little whether they work with hands or head,
although more and more we are growing to realize that it is a good
thing to have the same man work with both head and hands. These men,
in many different careers, do the work which is most important to the
community's life; although, of course, it must be supplemented by the
work of the other men whose education and activities are literary and
scholastic, of the men who work in politics or law, or in literary and
clerical positions.

Never forget that in any country the most important activities are the
activities of the man who works with head or hands in the ordinary
life of the community, whether he be handicraftsman, farmer, or
business man--no matter what his occupation, so long as it is useful
and no matter what his position, from the guiding intelligence at the
top down all the way through, just as long as his work is good. I
preach this to you here by the banks of the Nile, and it is the
identical doctrine I preach no less earnestly by the banks of the
Hudson, the Mississippi, and the Columbia.

Remember always that the securing of a substantial education, whether
by the individual or by a people, is attained only by a process, not
by an act. You can no more make a man really educated by giving him a
certain curriculum of studies than you can make a people fit for
self-government by giving it a paper constitution. The training of an
individual so as to fit him to do good work in the world is a matter
of years; just as the training of a nation to fit it successfully to
fulfil the duties of self-government is a matter, not of a decade or
two, but of generations. There are foolish empiricists who believe
that the granting of a paper constitution, prefaced by some
high-sounding declaration, of itself confers the power of
self-government upon a people. This is never so. Nobody can "give" a